Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsMore contemporary fantasy/paranormal mystery than romance
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2021
When Lindsay Buroker announced that as a little summer project she was planning to write a light-hearted little shifter story featuring a werewolf and a vegetarian witch, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, and I was not disappointed.
Though the story starts like several others of the genre (#PWF), with the heroine – Morgen – recently divorced and approaching forty, inheriting a house and large property outside of Seattle from her grandmother, Buroker gives it her own characteristic twist. Since Morgen has also lost her job, she decides to have a look at the house, pack up her grandma’s belongings, so she can put the house up for sale. But when she arrives in (the fictional town of) Bellrock, she discovers that her grandmother had sort of a mysterious tenant, who is not at all keen on the property being sold, though there are definitively people interested in getting their hands on it. Also, she gets accosted by a big, bad wolf on her first day.
But Morgen is not so easily chased off, so she proceeds to take inventory of the house. She soon realizes that her grandmother had quite a few secrets and that she might have inherited more than just the house…
I love that there are now more and more books getting written where the protagonists are not in college or high-school and while I also liked the mystery and paranormal aspects of this book, I feel like I should give a warning: Buroker herself categorizes this as contemporary fantasy, and while I would even go so far as to describe it as UF (even with the small-town setting, since place plays an important role), it’s definitively not a romance. There is of course the possibility of a romance between Morgen and her grandmother’s gorgeous and mysterious tenant, Amar, and though there is some banter and ogling of abs, and they become sort of allies, it doesn’t really go any farther than that. Naturally I hope there will be some movement in their relationship in book 2 and 3, but I wasn’t really bothered by the lack of romance, since the story managed to keep me captivated. And having read other books/series by Buroker, I am of course well aware that she is the queen of “deferred gratification”.
